http://www.amazon.com/Eroticism-Spirituality-Resistance-Womens-Writings/dp/0813033772
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/roundtable-discussion-beyonce-formation-blackness-feminism.html
http://thembisamshaka.com/2016/02/09/beyonce-formation-a-dont-overthink-piece/
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2016/02/why-you-should-get-in-formation/
“People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you’re dead, when they’ve killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn’t have any character. They weep big, bitter tears – not for you. For themselves, because they’ve lost their toy.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country
And my favorite Jimmy B. moment, ever:
I saw him once, on the terrace of Le Colombe d’Or in St. Paul de Vence. I was 11, having dinner with my mom and her friend Pat, a Jamaican mar
ried to British record producer Denis Preston, which allowed Pat to make her art and move in such circles. I was at least as enchanted by dining outside under olive trees as I was by the glimpse of the little man with the frog eyes at the other table, but from the tone of the adults, it was clear that this was a Moment To Remember. And I have.
I dreamt I was Marilyn Monroe – in the famous white dress – shackled on the floor of a limousine by faceless white men in suits seated across from each other. One good kick to the balls and a headbutt later, I was out of the car. But my hands 
were still tied.
Tamron Hall on the Today Show tells of waking up at 4 a.m. to discover a cast iron pot on the stove atop full heat. “I could have burned down the house,” she says. She had a house guest, but they weren’t there; turns out Tamron was sleepwalking. She calls her mother, and it turns out sleepwalking runs in the family. Al Roker suggests she install monitors to capture herself sleepwalking, and that the Today Show do a whole segment on sleepwalking. #blackanchorsaweigh #dreamingwhileblack
This post is offered in the spirit of a tweet i saw the other day by @jeremyweate “Towards a Phenomenology of Complicity: the subtle ways in which we nourish the status quo”. Fantasy book title du jour”
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A friend recently posted about a White tennis player calling the DC police because he couldn’t get the court he wanted because there was a predominantly Black youth tennis tournament going on. When the police showed up, he waved them on because he’d found a court to play on.
I had a peace warrant sworn out against me by two White former housemates. Fortunately, when I learned about it, I had the airline ticket stubs to prove that I was out of the country when their coke-fueled paranoia kicked in.
Ordinary White people call in the armed cavalry all the time when their phantoms get loose. The cavalry is not what they need in that moment, but too often the cavalry sees the same phantoms and joins the hallucinating complainant in abominable acts.
I am glad that I only have to imagine, rather than actually experience for the umpteenth time, the public discussion that would be happening if the teen who took the video and is witnessing were not White.
to kick off an eight week online workshop is interrupted by a phone call about a leak into your tenant’s apartment and no one’s home in the leaking place, you know that an eight week online course in meditation is exactly what you need.
Maybe I’ve told this story before:
When University of Miami got James Michener money after he wrote the execrable “The Caribbean,” they didn’t know what to do with it (Michener had a lovely habit of profit-sharing with the subjects of his novels, but somehow hesitated to give this money to UWI). They improvised a set of summer workshops for and by Caribbean writers. I got a scholarship to attend the first one in the summer of 1991: Kamau Brathwaite led the poetry workshop, and George Lamming led the fiction one. It was breathtakingly intimidating, yet I made some friends for life. I enjoyed thinking that the profits from Michener’s book were funding its many corrections.
The following year or the year after, they added seminars for scholars of Caribbean literature. Lamming ran the critical seminar for scholars this time, and another writer told me that she would return to the hotel where the workshop leaders were housed to find him sitting in the lobby, sipping a drink, and reading madly in Black feminist scholarship and more in order to keep up with the grad students and other scholars who were peppering him with questions based on their understandings of the then- (maybe ever-) emergent field of Caribbean/postcolonial literatures.
My love and respect for him grew even more, which I did not think was possible. After all, this was George Lamming. His life in Caribbean literature, not just as an author but as an editor and promoter and performer (he was the BBC voice of the Englishes-speaking Caribbean as early as the 1950’s), would have been an adequate textbook for such a seminar. Instead, he wanted to keep up with the next generation, and if it meant sitting in the dark bar, contending with what we know is the often deliberately impenetrable prose of academia, his mind and heart were open to it.
So happy 88th birthday, George Lamming. In the Castle of My Skin is a more intimate touchstone to me, but in the family of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Especial thanks for recognizing, naming, and sharing The Pleasures of Exile.
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